


The Winter Garden

by honey_wheeler



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-02
Updated: 2016-01-02
Packaged: 2018-05-11 02:56:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,482
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5611249
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/honey_wheeler/pseuds/honey_wheeler
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He’s been planning the surprise for Sansa for moons now, nearly as long as they’ve been wed. He supposes he’s been in love with her just as long. Their marriage was made in the name of alliances and shared power rather than shared feeling, but Willas can’t imagine anyone who could know Sansa Stark and <i>not</i> fall in love with her. From the moment she’d arrived at Highgarden, he’d been enchanted with her, wanting only to please her, to delight her, to bring that lovely smile of hers to her face whenever possible.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Winter Garden

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the **[Game of Ships](http://gameofshipschallenges.tumblr.com/)** Countdown to Wintertown Challenge.

Willas feels faintly absurd.

Even among the pampered, elegant Tyrells, he’s always gotten a bit of guff for being soft. Before his accident, he was never more than a competent fighter. He never had dreams of glory in battle, nor aims for any station higher than his own. Even Margaery’s brand of gentle scheming is beyond him; Willas would rather read a book than a room, and he finds more reward in stroking a hawk’s feathers than in stroking anyone’s ego. He’s no stranger to being out of step with his family.

Even so, he thinks they would all raise a wry brow if they knew the pains he’d taken with the back garden, fretting over the fickle autumn weather, directing the grounds men in cultivating the planting just so, rejecting half a dozen types of blooms because their petals weren’t sufficiently white. They’d think it quite unlike him, all this fussing. After all, no one in his family has ever seen him besottedly in love before.

He’s been planning the surprise for Sansa for moons now, nearly as long as they’ve been wed. He supposes he’s been in love with her just as long. Their marriage was made in the name of alliances and shared power rather than shared feeling, but Willas can’t imagine anyone who could know Sansa Stark and _not_ fall in love with her. From the moment she’d arrived at Highgarden, he’d been enchanted with her, wanting only to please her, to delight her, to bring that lovely smile of hers to her face whenever possible.

That smile is worth a thousand plants in a thousand gardens.

It’s the warmest day of an already mild winter so far when Willas finally takes her to see it. Sansa submits patiently to his awkward attempts to shield her already closed eyes with one hand while struggling down the path with his crutch in the other; she doesn’t once suggest she shield her own eyes, which makes him fall in love with her just a little bit more than he already was. Her hand is light on the inside of his elbow as she lets him guide her, but he feels the weight of it burning through his thin tunic like a brand. They stumble together on a dip in the pathway and Sansa laughs breathlessly, tightening her hand on his arm for a moment.

“Given the things you’re usually this excited and nervous about, I can only assume you’re taking me to see a new hawk,” she teases him gently. “Or…” She pauses and suddenly her cheeks flame, warm enough that he can feel the flush of blood against his palm. “Or taking me to bed. Though the grounds seem a curious place for a bed.” Out of the corner of his eye, he sees her bite her lip as if shy about her own boldness, a paradox that makes Willas’s heart throb as much as his crotch does at her implication.

And then he imagines actually having a bed in the garden he’s made for her, dressed in snow white linens and gauzy curtains to match the flowers all around it, with Sansa spread lavishly in the middle of it, her bare skin nearly as pale as the linens and flowers, her hair a burnished flame across the pillows, pink tinting her lips, her cheeks, her belly and knees and between them…

“Oh!” she cries out as he stumbles again, jostling her in the process.

“Neither, I’m afraid,” he says, recovering himself before she can worry and bringing her to a halt at the beginning of the garden he’s had made for her. “But hopefully you’ll indulge me as you always do on the former. And…” He hesitates – this sort of wordplay is new for them – but then he plunges ahead, taking his cue from her bravery, wanting to be as open with his desire as he is with his heart. “And I hope you’ll enjoy it much the same way you seem to enjoy the latter.” He cannot keep a bit of question from creeping into his voice, which has gone rough and low, like someone else’s voice entirely. Sansa has been so many firsts to him, and she’s always embraced the intimacies between them with an enthusiasm that Willas hopes is unfeigned, though he’d never be brave enough to directly ask such a painfully vulnerable thing, even if he had any idea how to go about the asking.

She shivers, and he flatters himself by thinking that it’s not in response to any breeze or sudden chill. “I’m not sure I can enjoy anything happening out here as much as I enjoy that,” she says, her own voice gone soft and suggestive, though again she bites her lip, once more that bold yet shy girl who suddenly – wonderfully – seems as tentative and vulnerable as he. Equal parts relief and need and love flood through Willas’s veins. Gods, he wants to kiss her. But he wants her to see her gift more.

“Look,” he urges, dropping his hand to rest on her waist. He doesn’t look around at the garden to see what she’s seeing when she blinks against the sunlight. He’s looked at this garden a hundred times over the last few moons and knows precisely what she’ll see: profusions of roses, lilies, snow-in-summer and asters, clouds of sweet alyssum climbing over everything, even a special type of morning glory wrapped around a marble statue of the Maiden, all in pristine, snowy white, and all presided over by the ancient ornamental fruit trees with their tiny, papery-white flowers, which were what had given him the idea in the first place when he’d wandered in a happy, lovesick haze through this seldom-used garden not long after the wedding and seen the way their petals drifted to the ground like snow. As if on cue, a breeze curls around them, teasing the circular petals from the branches and sending them fluttering through the air in the gentlest facsimile of snowfall imaginable.

“Willas,” Sansa breathes, her face lit with awe and pleasure, tinged with the wistfulness he’s come to learn is her love of her home in the North. He’ll take her there, he decides himself. They’ll go on a grand tour, as the old Targaryen Kings and Queens used to do, and visit her home and her family, the boy Rickon and her half-brother Jon Snow.

“I know our winters aren’t what you’re used to,” he says, driven by a need to explain, to make sure she understands what he was attempting. “Maybe when you feel homesick, you can come sit here and pretend you’re home for a bit? Sort of the Highgarden version of winter.” It seems silly when he says it – suddenly the whole thing seems dangerously like it might be silly – but then she turns to him with a brilliant smile and a wet glint in her eye that threatens to upend his heart entirely.

“It’s perfect,” she says. Small, white petals cling to her hair and Willas could almost imagine it’s a proper winter.

“I’d love to see you in real snow,” he says, lifting his hand to pluck a petal from the long curl that lies over her breast, but then letting his touch linger, feeling the silken weight of her hair sliding through his fingers, the rougher weave of her gown against his knuckles, the soft swell of her bosom beneath it. She always wears her hair fully down when they’re in bed, and Willas remembers the way it feels on his bare skin and feels his gut tighten.

“You would?” she asks, giving him a coquettish smile, the type Margaery deploys in public without hesitation but which Willas has never seen on Sansa before.

“I would,” he breathes. Her smile changes, turns sly and seductive as she steps forward to rest her hands on his shoulders, her feet between his and her chest just barely touching his. She’d been in his lap like that last night, the peaks of her breasts dragging maddeningly, intoxicatingly against his bare skin as she moved over him, around him, until he’d ducked to take one into his mouth and work at the stiff peak with his tongue.

“Well,” she says. “I’d love you to take me back to our bedchamber so I can thank you properly.” Her kiss is sweet, light, a delicate contrast to the earthiness of her suggestion. Again, Willas marvels at the paradox of her. Marvels that she’s his.

“As my lady wishes.” He offers his arm to her. The path back is long, and part of Willas is impatient, wishing he’d chosen a closer garden to be more quickly inside with her.

The rest of him isn’t. He’s walking his gardens with his lady on his arm, his _wife_. They could walk like this forever and Willas thinks he could be happy.


End file.
